Justice authorizes dismissal of 255 from Fogo de Chão steakhouse

The São Paulo Labor Court has authorized the collective dismissal and without prior negotiations of 255 workers at the Fogo de Chao meat restaurant due to the economic impacts from the pandemic. The closures began in March of last year. The decision of Seventh Labor Court Justice, Juliana Petnat Salles, was issued on Tuesday (20). The judge also denied individual recall requests for restaurant employees.

According to the complaint filed by MPT (Ministry of Public Labor), the restaurant company had implemented mass layoffs of workers in March 2020, at the start of the covid-19 pandemic. Initially, the agency stated that the company was not going to pay severance payments to the group, which was implemented throughout the process.

As the judge noted in the lawsuit, since the 2017 labor reform, labor law does not require that collective dismissals be negotiated beforehand. “It is true that the doctrine and jurisprudence of the homelands are very critical of the aforementioned legal provision, as the setback represented by this rule is undeniable and reprehensible and its provisions are in danger of insufficient working group by removing the reasoning that was created and standardized previously, starting from the justice system The work in force at that time “justified.”

When analyzing MPT’s request to return and pay moral damages to a group of employees, the judge assessed that the restaurant had been severely affected by the economic crisis imposed by the covid-19 pandemic. “In this context, it is clear that the prevailing economic activity developed by the defendants, and therefore, the daily work of the employees who worked in these institutions was suddenly and doubly affected as of March 2020,” he said.